nas was right... hip hop is dead

a couple of friends and i traveled to new york city this past weekend to attend "rock the bells"... a concert boasting a lineup that featured the best in "real" hip hop, including such names as the roots, mos def, talib kweli, erykah badu, wu-tang, rage against the machine, cypress hill, public enemy, immortal technique, murs, bother ali... i think you get the idea. this concert was gonna be sick... and it should've been, the ticket was over 80 bucks.

lemme first explain what i mean by "real" hip hop... not that mainstream shit you hear on the radio that reinforces images of black male rappers who are violent and mysogenistc... but the underground stuff. it's often political, non-commerical, musically more experimental... and you don't hear it on the radio. it appeals to a wide ranging audience but when my two friends and i (one staight black male and the other a latino gay male) walked up out of the subway at 125th street in harlem... the line to get into the show was composed of about 75% white males.

so we get to the show and the first group on stage is boot camp click performing a remix of buju banton's "boom bye bye"... more or less rappin about shootin gays in the head. alright, so i figure this will be an aberation and good vibes will follow. the line up roles along and we'd ended up meeting some other friends, at which point immortal technique comes on. this dude is angry, leftist, and violent. not to mention, i'd say about 1 in 15 people had white immortal technique t-shirts on that read "revolutionary" with the picture of a gun beneath it. it was clear to me all these white boys needed to proclaim their radicality to the world. so given the homophobic context of previous songs... we all really started to freak out once immortal technique started to yell out "yall need to be pointing your guns at the RIGHT people!"

ok, so let's break this one down... maybe he's talking about the christian right? probably not, but maybe. the people in power? another good guess. but in the same verse where the man is proclaiming violence against women and following acts that glorify shooting gays... it could mean pointing "your" (the 75% white male audience's) guns at anyone. and for white men, these targets have traditionally been people of color, women and non-heterosexuals.

while i can understand that immortal technique raps from a place of great anger... to awaken a revolutionary spirit in others who are OPPRESSED... this music is consumed by an audience (white males) which already benefits from enormous privilege at the expense of others. his lyrics dilude a privileged audience into thinking that they are part of the revolutionary fight to claim a free space... a space that is already their own in many senses. when immortal technique calls for everyone to raise their fists in the air... it reminds me more of a hitler youth rally than a revolutionary war cry.

and how much do these white males really understand this "revolutionary" ideology that they claim to be so whole heartedly committed to? well, obviously, they have the "revolutionary" t-shirt, so that must mean something, right? yeah, that they're consuming a fetishized image of what it means to be a revolutionary. they can buy into the part, consuming (that's what real CAPITALISTS do, right?) the image, and dilude themselves that they are "down" in the struggle while ulitmately they are probably scarring the shit out of any non-staight white male at the concert and reasserting their dominance of the space and making it unsafe for anyone else. it's clear most of the people there had no fucking clue, and the atmosphere at the concert was quite indicative of this. not to mention, when a mud wrestling match broke out in the middle of the concert like 600 people circled around to watch and weren't even listening to the music.

to me, this is even more telling of an audience who can pay the money to attend a "real" hip hop concert and play the part of a progressive white person, but ultimately, when (quite literally) push comes to shove... they really don't give a shit about any kind of revolutionary change. only consuming the image of blackness and revolutionary social change. if this is how hip hop functions in our society, it is only creating a revolutionary simulacra for the diluded imaginations of the privilieged few who have the the money to buy the CDs or the tickets and the time to waste searching the internet for the newest group.